Under sail again! Further tuning the sailing rig on AL DEMANY CHIMAN

It took longer than I had hoped to rebuild the lateen yard so that I could get my skin-on-frame outrigger canoe AL DEMANY CHIMAN under sail again. Recently, though, I finally completed that task and yesterday morning life and the weather gave me an opening to get “the sail canoe” under sail for the second time.

Truthfully, the weather could have helped a bit more – the wind was fairly light and flukey. This said, I did have a nice little sail and made some progress towards having the sailing rig fully tuned and “done.” The new yard did well and the reworked main sheet arrangement was much better. I think I also have identified the right spot on the yard for the halyard.

Left to do is to do some thinking on the leeboard. The boat definitely wants the lateral resistance to go upwind well, but there are two issues. First, the bracket I designed to clip the board to the gunnel just isn’t working. On port tack it was just about pulling up and over the rub rail. I think I am going to need to use a bracket the crosses the hull and clips under the inwale on both sides; this is the more common arrangement I have seen in Gary Dierkingand Todd Bradshaw‘s books.

The other problem is that the board will still not reliably stay down, even after I added leather washers. Not sure what my next step is on this one.

I’ll also be playing with the steer oar to try to improve it. Steering will be something I’ll be playing with further, I suspect.

[…] bracket is giving us a tough lesson in the physics of lateral resistance. My first attempts showed flaws in the bracket to clip the board to the single side gunnel. The second attempt,from late summer,is below. I followed the published models and build a bracket […]